Ryan's love-hate with Ayn Rand

Romney running mate Paul Ryan’s position on controversial philosopher and author Ayn Rand has changed somewhat over the years, from when he supposedly made his interns read “Atlas Shrugged” to when earlier this year he rejected her philosophy.

Rand’s philosophy of Objectivism is, in her telling of it, based in part on the principle that “the pursuit of [a person’s] own rational self-interest and of his own happiness is the highest moral purpose of his life.”

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In April, Ryan told the National Review’s Robert Costa that his supposed devotion to Rand’s teaching was “an urban legend.”

“I reject her philosophy,” Ryan said this year. “It’s an atheist philosophy. It reduces human interactions down to mere contracts and it is antithetical to my worldview. If somebody is going to try to paste a person’s view on epistemology to me, then give me Thomas Aquinas…Don’t give me Ayn Rand.”

While Ryan said he “enjoyed” Rand’s novels when he was young, he added that it “it’s a big stretch to suggest that a person is therefore an Objectivist.”

But there is evidence to show a period when Ryan had a deep interest in Rand’s writings.

In 2003, the Wisconsin Republican told The Weekly Standard’s writer Katherine Mangu-Ward, now at the libertarian Reason magazine, that he gave out Rand’s books as gifts and tried to make interns read it.

“I give out ‘Atlas Shrugged’ [by Ayn Rand] as Christmas presents, and I make all my interns read it. Well… I try to make my interns read it,” he said.

However, even then, Ryan pointed out that while he “looked into” Rand’s philosophy, Objectivism, he is a Christian and reads the bible often.

In 2005, he said before the Objectivist organization the Atlas Society that, “[T]he reason I got involved in public service, by and large, if I had to credit one thinker, one person, it would be Ayn Rand. And the fight we are in here, make no mistake about it, is a fight of individualism versus collectivism.”

In 2009, in a multi-part video series posted to Facebook, Paul Ryan said that “what’s unique about what’s happening today in government, in the world, in America, is that it’s as if we’re living in an Ayn Rand novel right now. I think Ayn Rand did the best job of anybody to build a moral case of capitalism, and that morality of capitalism is under assault.”

“Ayn Rand, more than anyone else, did a fantastic job of explaining the morality of capitalism, the morality of individualism, and this to me is what matters most,” he said in the second part of the series.